Facebook’s Social Feed: How to Check Your Privacy Settings

Facebook is making another effort to capture a bigger share of the “social conversation” around news and pop-culture events. Your posts might be part of that push if you aren’t up to snuff on how you publish.

The Journal’s Evelyn Rusli has the details on the change. Facebook is giving a small group of media companies — and more down the road, including “preferred marketing developers” — the ability to tap into its feed of posts that people marked as public. The organizations also gain access to Keyword Insights tools that let them sift posts based on a certain time frame or by demographic information such as gender or age.

It’s all an effort to broaden the social network beyond a private club for friends and family to a public town square, like Twitter. Facebook’s point is that its users, too, flood the site with talk about things like the Boston bombing or the latest can-you-believe-that moment on “Breaking Bad.” Here’s Facebook’s announcement.

Starting today, selected news organizations can begin to integrate Facebook conversations into their broadcasts or coverage by displaying public posts of real-time activity about any given topic. For example, CNN’s New Day can now easily incorporate what people on Facebook have to say about the latest, breaking news event during their show.

That’s where you come in.

Do you know whether your posts — be they angry musings about the New York Giants’ six turnovers last night or sharp criticism of the governor — are public? Some people, like the New York Times’s Nicholas Kristof, use a part of their Facebook account as a public space to promote their brand and engage with readers, a lot like Twitter. They have actively made that choice.

But for the everyday Facebook user, it can be tricky despite increasingly transparent tools to manage privacy. Between your own posts on desktop and mobile, posts you have been tagged in, photo uploads and doled out “likes” to an increasing array of content in the newsfeed, you might not realize what you have made private and what is public.

Understanding your privacy settings became important when Facebook introduced Graph Search, and it’s becoming more essential as the company introduces new ways to tout public conversations, like trending sections.

Here are a few ways to check:

First, look at your profile broadly. On the top right of the blue bar you will see a small “padlock” icon to quickly look at privacy settings. (It’s next to the “gear” icon, which is another entryway into privacy settings.) Click the padlock and select “who can see my stuff.” Under “who can see my future posts,” see if it says something like “friends” or “public.” In some cases, your “like” or comment” will be public if the content itself — like a blog post from a news website — is public.

You can also click on “Activity Log” to see what you have posted or done on Facebook, and who can see it. On the right side if each entry is a small grey icon of people’s heads. Hover your mouse cursor over the icon to find out and change who can see each piece of information. The pencil icon next to the people icon will tell you if the item was allowed to be posted on your timeline, and that can be changed from here as well.

On the left side of the Activity Log screen, you can filter all of the content by type (photos, likes, comments) and whether you or someone else (your posts, posts by others) was involved in the action.

The “padlock” icon has one more tool worth checking: “What do other people see on my timeline?” Click “view as” and you get a look at your public profile. One of the first things you might notice is that your cover photo – the big image atop your timeline — is public. So is your profile pic. A lot of people use their kids in these pictures, not realizing that once they are used in that way the pictures become public. Click on any photo to gain access to the little “globe” icon underneath your name, and change the setting as you see fit.

Facebook is a giant reservoir of information, and there many ways to see and access that data. A good rule of thumb is that most individual boxes or sections have small icons on the upper right-hand side — they aren’t always the same icon — that can be accessed to change who can see that data.

Rusli has written about some ways to better understand your settings, so check out those tips here. If you have a tip for readers, share it in the comments section.